Today was another 'excursion Saturday' for my wife and me. Why did Ohio name so many cities and towns after cities of the world.....Paris, Athens, Toledo, Lima, Dublin, East Liverpool, even Calcutta! We visited Cambridge today...it's about three hours east of Oxford. Anyway, every year at this time they have what they call the Dickens Village where among other things their main street is lined with life size figures from the Victorian Age of Charles Dickens. I've told you before how I am an art aficionado, my latest purchase being a village glistening under a cover of snow......with about fifty little LED lights mixed within! I thought you might want to know that in advance, for I saw in those figures some pretty good art! The faces were so expressive!
We also toured the Cambridge Glass Museum with our own docent. I tried to tip him but he wouldn't take it. His expert commentary on the American parlor made the experience over-the-top. Now I don't know a lot about glass but I know history and our tour took us through the style changes of dinnerware in America in the first half of the 20th century. I could see Gatsby in the 20s, Joe and Rose Kennedy in the 30s, FDR in the 40s and.....my grandparents.......in the 50s.
Apparently I can't visit a Dickens village or even a glass museum without seeing Karl Marx. Mark Levin describes the miscalculations of Marx in his book Plunder And Deceit which you have to read.....if you care one iota about our country, you have to read it. Marx and Engels predicted that capitalism would doom unskilled workers for life. I saw in those plaster faces today the struggle within capitalism in London in the early Victorian Age. I saw the good and the bad. Marx was wrong as Levin points out, it's Marx's philosophy...and his ideology that destroys; ours is but man doing the best he can....with a fallen nature....but privy to the knowledge that..."The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom... "
